The Sapphire Yield

In the cradle of youth,
days poured like amaretto,
sweet and unguarded,
a tumultuous cascade over sapphire stones.
Red-letter mornings gleamed –
not mere sunlight’s boast
but the Begotten’s voice,
crystalline, quickening the throb
with a koinonia so pure
it felt like freckles
kissed across the face of time.
Life teethed gently then,
a fanciful eutopia,
bitter only as a fleeting aftertaste,
the world an amber vow
of ceaseless unfolding.  

Then,
a seething rupture.
The skin prickles,
an abscess festers in the mind
not death’s arrival,
but its rumor,
cancerous, lancing the calm.
The air thickens,
clipped beats stutter
in the chest.
Bitter,
oh bitter,
the beggar of mortality
rises unbidden,
its gaze a mirror
I cannot unsee.
The unfairness sears
no vote in the hour,
no plea to sway
the immortal clock.
I wake,
sinner quivering,
teething on dread.  

Yet
rest dawns,
a the pull shifts,
the rhythm lifts
like a liturgy carved in glow.
Life is no random drift,
but a red-letter ceremony,
a worship begged
from powder to kavod.
The Sola of my being
quicken to this –
He is no fanciful dream,
no tame shepherd,
but a seething majesty,
glorious and immense,
lancing the dark
with a sapphire will.
The fool sees chaos,
a universe abscessed with chance,
but I see the hand –
terrible, unguarded,
thickening the good
beyond my grasp.  

Death lingers,
yes,
its amber heft
still plucks at the edges,
a sinner’s shiver
in the quiet.
But the crystalline truth
haunts sweeter –
I am clay,
begotten for Him,
a beggar crowned
in this fleeting temple.
Not to eutopia,
not to a neat bow,
but to a rest
that pierces with beauty,
a red-letter echo
of His reign.
The fear softens,
giggling faintly
beneath the sapphire sky,
and I yield –
not to the end,
but to the One
who holds it,
amber and all,
in hands too immense
to fathom.